


Family Trees

by hufflepirate



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Sherlock Has a Daughter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:31:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ivy Holmes’s family is complicated - it has been since the day Irene left her on Sherlock’s doorstep.  When her teacher assigns a family tree project for school, it takes a little help from her favorite “Uncle” to get everything down on paper without ignoring her teacher’s directions.</p><p>(I wrote this before Season 3, but didn't make any changes to it.  Some updatey kind of thoughts are in the end notes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Trees

Ivy Holmes was 6 years old when she came home crying over her first bad grade. John found her curled up in a tight ball at the end of the sofa, with her knees pulled tightly against her chest.  As he closed the door behind him with a click, Ivy looked up, brushing the tears out of her bright blue eyes.

"Hullo, Uncle John," she said glumly, sliding her arms up to rest on top of her knees and placing her chin on her forearm.  She didn’t try to hide the tear tracks on her face or the puffiness around her eyes, but she didn’t say anything about the sea of paper scraps that surrounded her either, as if she hoped he would pretend nothing was going on and leave her to it.

"Ivy, love, where’s your father?"  He always let Sherlock take first crack at Ivy’s problems, even if just because it seemed like the right thing to do.  And sometimes it was better that way - John had never been a genius and didn’t know what it was like.

The girl sniffled, “Upstairs.  I think he’s finally sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake him up.”

John sighed.  Sherlock was good with Ivy, and he loved her more than most people would have thought Sherlock was capable of loving, but that didn’t mean he’d stopped his self-destructive behavior.  He hadn’t slept in days, enthralled by their most recent case and pushing himself through it, and if his biological limitations had finally caught up to him, trying to wake him up before he was ready would be next to useless.

John brushed some of the paper scraps off of the sofa and sat down beside the girl, holding his arm out toward her as an invitation to snuggle.  She nestled immediately into his side, almost sitting in his lap, and for a moment, he simply rested his cheek against her dark curls and sat there, hoping the contact would comfort her.

"Ok, Sprout," he said eventually, when she didn’t let go, "Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?" 

Ivy spoke without moving away from John’s side.  "My stupid teacher won’t let me do my project right.  She told me to do it a specific way because everyone else was doing it that way, but I said no because my way was better, and she failed me.  And we’re supposed to present them in class tomorrow and I don’t want to show the other kids that I got an F.”

John sighed.  They had feared many things when they sent Ivy to school, even with her only skipping ahead by a single year.  They had feared that the other students would be mean to a girl who hadn’t gone to reception with them, and that they wouldn’t like a girl nearly two years younger (she had quite the latest birthday in her class and would have been the youngest even in the class she was “meant” to be in) who was smart enough to leave them in the dust as far as school-work went.  They had worried that Sherlock’s anti-social tendencies would come out, or that Irene’s violent ones would.  They’d worried that she wouldn’t make friends and they’d worried about her being bullied.

It had turned out that the problem was never the kids.  The problem had always been the adults.  When Ivy said her teacher was stupid, it wasn’t an insult said out of anger.  She stated it as a fact and she meant it literally.  Most teachers did not take that very well from a child Ivy’s age.  Most of them took it even less well when Sherlock immediately agreed with her.

John squeezed Ivy’s shoulders gently.  "What was the assignment?  Maybe we can figure out how to make her happy without you having to do it wrong.  Do you think she would take the assignment late if you did it over?”

She wrinkled her nose, “Maybe she would take it, but I still don’t think there’s a way she and I can both like it.  It’s  _supposed_  to be a family tree.  But our family doesn’t  _look_  like a tree, so a tree is  _wrong_.  And then I made a web instead.  And she didn’t like that, so I made a pyramid.  And then she didn’t like  _that_  and she gave me an F because I didn’t ‘follow directions.’  Because she’s stupid and she can’t understand that not every family is like a tree.”

John remembered doing his own family tree in school.  He’d asked his mother for the answers, and he’d finished it in a few minutes.  But Ivy was right.  Her family  _didn’t_ work that way.  She couldn’t fill in neat blanks and be done, not with Irene who-knew-where and Sherlock and Mycroft keeping their histories intentionally mysterious.  And it seemed patently unfair that she should have to fill those blanks the same way everyone else did, when her family didn’t work the way everyone else’s did.

But he couldn’t tell Ivy that.  He couldn’t encourage her to refuse to do things just because they were unfair or inconvenient.  There was something to be said for the importance of following directions, even if no one else in the flat ever seemed to think so.  He thought hard for a moment, long enough for Ivy to push away from his side and turn to look at him.

"Ivy," he asked, "Do you know  _why_  your teacher is teaching you about family trees?”

Ivy wrinkled her nose, “Because she’s stupid and she just wants to grade us on if the blanks are filled in so that it’s easier for her.  But I  _won’t_  lie about my family, because I’m not  _supposed_  to tell lies.  Because telling lies isn’t good.  You and Daddy said that.  'Bit not good.'”

John doubted Ivy’s teacher was thinking solely about how easy things were to grade.  He hadn’t gotten the impression that this particular teacher was lazy or disengaged or incompetent, and they’d almost made it through the entire first term already, so it seemed a relatively safe bet that she wasn’t.  He rubbed his hand for a moment, trying to keep his emotions out of it for long enough to think through the potential value of the assignment.

It was probably a good thing that he’d done this particular mental exercise multiple times before.  Ivy did things well when she did them and until today she had gotten excellent grades on assignments she found interesting or important enough to bother doing.  Many of those assignments had taken quite a bit of talking up to get her to do them to begin with, because Ivy only had a problem with getting low grades when they were things she’d done.  She had no problem taking a 0 for work she hadn’t done, and her overall class grade seemed not to matter to her at all.

"Well," he said, "If you’d like to know what I think, I have my own theory about why she wants you to make a family  _tree_.”

Ivy’s eyes narrowed for a moment and then relaxed again, as if she were deciding whether or not to ask about his theory.  John wasn’t as good at deductions as any of the Holmeses were, but they tended to listen to him about what was going on in people’s heads, and he wasn’t surprised when she asked tentatively “Why  _does_  she want me to make a tree?”

"Because a family tree is a specific structure that other people are familiar with. Sometimes we have to explain things so that they make sense to other people, and not just so they make sense to us.  Patterns like a family tree help us do that because other people know how to read them without our help.  I bet if I drew you my family tree and I didn’t say anything to you about the people on it at all, you would still be able to tell how I was related to everyone.  And anyone else who studied family trees in school could too, because it’s something we all know together.”

Ivy looked thoughtful for a moment.  Then she wrinkled her nose.  "But what if I want to tell people other stuff, besides what the family tree tells?  What if I don’t care if people know who my blood relatives are and I  _do_  care that people know about you and Grandma Hudson and Aunt Molly and Uncle Greg?”

John had no real answer to that, but he  _did_  know that if he was going to get Ivy to redo the assignment for a higher grade, he was going to have to think of something. The upside was that Ivy seemed invested in the problem of describing her family, even if she wasn’t invested in the idea of a tree.

"Well, let’s see what we can do.  Why don’t we tape all this stuff back together so you can show me what you did?  Maybe we can figure out what else you could do when we’re looking at how everyone is connected.”

Ivy had torn her failed papers up quite thoroughly.  The reassembly took almost an hour and produced two sheets of paper that were almost more tape than anything else. Ivy shoved the pyramid off to the side and pulled the web into the middle. "This one’s better.  I only made that other one because I thought it was more like the tree she wanted.”

John was startled to find that when Ivy said “web,” she didn’t mean the standard circles-and-lines diagram he’d learned in school.  She meant an actual picture of a spider web.  And of course she had, because he realized suddenly that making what passed for webs in English class was something she hadn’t been taught yet.  She could have the general idea herself, but the mechanics of circles and arrows and lines were unfamiliar.  It just reinforced in his mind the importance of getting her to do her assignments the way her teacher wanted them done.  Having things in one’s head and getting them out of one’s head in a readable structure other people could follow were never quite the same thing, no matter how smart you were.

John studied the web for a moment, a brief pang of loss running through his heart as he noticed “Aunt Mary” written near his own name, with a small angel drawn beside it.  His wife had died when Ivy was three years old, and if it were any other child, he would wonder whether Ivy even remembered her.  It was good to know that she did, even if it didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.

"Why don’t you tell me how this works, Ivy?  I want to see how everything goes together, so we can start figuring out how we might be able to make it into trees instead.”

Ivy looked at him as if he were stupid for a moment, then pointed agreeably to the center of the web, where her own name was written in her neatest handwriting. "That’s me.  I’m in the middle, obviously, because people are connected to me in different ways, but they’re all  _my_  family.”

John nodded and Ivy continued, pointing out to the strands that fanned out around her, toward the edges of the paper, “These lines are how the people in the web are connected to me.  I put people that go together on the same line.  Like this one has you and Daddy and Grandma Hudson, because we all live here in the same building.  And this one has Uncle Greg and Aunt Sally, because I see them at crime scenes when you and Daddy are working.  And this one has Aunt Molly and Uncle Mike, because they both work at St. Barts.  And this one just has Uncle Mycroft, because he’s different.”

John was a bit surprised to see Mike Stamford on the web and  _very_  surprised to see Sally Donovan there, but as he thought about it, he realized that the two of them  _did_ end up watching Ivy fairly often when Sherlock and John were looking at things they didn’t want Ivy to see, like murder scenes or bodies in the middle of autopsies.  He supposed it made sense that Ivy would think of them as important people in her life, regardless of how her father and uncle felt about that.

"Ok," he said, "so what are the lines that go between those threads for?  I see that you put Aunt Mary on one of the spiral lines.”

Ivy nodded, explaining, “That’s ‘cause she’s connected to you.  The lines across go where people are connected to each other, not just to me.  So this line that connects Daddy with Uncle Mycroft is because they’re brothers and this long spirally line through Daddy and Uncle Greg and Aunt Molly is because they work together, too, just not at the same place.  And then I put in lines between you and Uncle Greg and Aunt Molly ‘cause you also work together, but I didn’t do lines between Grandma Hudson and everybody else because even though sometimes Uncle Greg and Aunt Molly come over to the flat, it’s not as often as when you guys go see them for work.”

Ivy had said nothing about the last outward line, which read simply “Irene,” or the fact that it was connected to Sherlock by a long spiral line and didn’t touch anyone else.  John let it go, because he had no idea how to even _start_ talking about Ivy’s mother.

"Ok," John said, focusing on the problem at hand, "So what if you made a tree for your blood family and a tree for your living-on-Baker-Street family and a tree for your Dad’s-work family? That sounds like most of what you have here."

Ivy looked skeptical, but agreed, and set to work, engrossing herself first in the easy work of describing the Baker Street family.  She pretended that Uncle John and Grandma Hudson were really related to her with those titles and flew through it. 

The family tree for her father’s work was harder, Ivy muttering to herself, drawing and then erasing a dozen times and, eventually, filling in the blanks with nouns like “crime” and “Scotland Yard” and “St. Barts.”  The tree ended up quite upside-down, with crime as the focal point instead of Ivy, because that was how all the people Sherlock worked with were connected.  But she’d used the correct formatting for a family tree, so he hoped her teacher wouldn’t complain too badly about it.

John had been worried that Ivy would push back against having to do the family tree for her actual blood relations, but now that she had everyone else who mattered neatly labeled on her other trees, she seemed excited by the prospect of getting this last aspect of her family history down on paper.

Hours later, Sherlock came out of his hibernation to find Ivy in the kitchen, shouting search terms over John’s shoulder as the blogger tried to google for information about Irene’s family without turning up anything about the woman herself that Ivy was too young to see - a nearly impossible feat that wasn’t helped much by Ivy’s excitement and impatience.

Looking over to the door, Ivy sprang away from John’s side and launched herself at her father, who caught her in a single practiced movement in spite of how exhausted he still looked, and swept her into a hug.  She immediately started wriggling back out of the embrace and dragging Sherlock over to the table to see her work. 

"Daddy, Daddy, come see!  I made family trees of everybody important, and look, I found out what your parents’ names were - and your grandparents’, all four of ‘em, ‘cause Uncle Mycroft knew.  Did you know that too, or did you delete it?  And here’s the flat and I put Grandma Hudson and Uncle John on it, but see, Aunt Molly had to come over here on the work tree, because you guys catch  _murderers_ …”

Sherlock nodded along as if he understood what Ivy was saying even as she rattled it all off at full-speed, and because he was Sherlock, he probably did.  He could also see that something bigger had happened here, his eyes darting over the taped-together papers at the end of the table and over both Ivy and John’s faces before specifically catching John’s eye again.  John nodded at him, and Sherlock nodded back.

The situation had been dealt with for now.  But once Ivy went to bed, there would be plenty to talk about.  Things like what to do about the fact that Ivy’s web had shown Irene shoved to the back or how to handle the fact that a live-in uncle was not the same as either a mother or a second father and that John, if he fell in love again, might leave.  Problems that had once been distant were suddenly looming over them, because Ivy was thinking about them, now, and she couldn’t be distracted by a new book on pill bugs or a trip to the science museum.

The family trees were done - but that didn’t mean they could forget about them. John settled in for a long night.  Sherlock never understood this sort of thing, and when they needed more from Ivy’s father than logicked-out recognition that something was wrong, it was always a painful process to get things sorted.  But Sherlock tried.  At least he tried.  And as Ivy sat at the table cheerfully pointing out every aspect of their family trees, John sat back and let Sherlock take the lead from him, just to see what happened.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm mostly putting this up because someone favorited it on tumblr out of the blue and that was weird.
> 
> But now that the 3rd season has aired and I've actually met Mary, I sort of regret killing her off in this. At the time, I didn't know anything about who she was going to be or what she was going to be like, and I didn't want to write her knowing there was a good chance I was doing it wrong. But given how well she and Sherlock got along, I feel like I could do this again with there just being a close relationship between them all even though they don't live together.
> 
>  
> 
> We've also met Sherlock's parents now, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that Ivy would have met them in spite of Sherlock's best efforts. But she'd still need Mycroft for her great-grandparents' names.
> 
> Also, one of the layouts should probably have Anderson in it, which... is still weird to me.


End file.
